Enrique Molina Garmendia, the Chilean spiritualist philosopher, was born at La Serena, Chile. After several years of practicing law and teaching on the faculty of the Liceo de Chillán, he became the first rector of the University of Concepción in 1919. He was one of the leading members of the generation of Latin American intellectuals who, under the influence of William James, Henri Bergson, and the French spiritualists, reacted against the positivism that had dominated the political and cultural life of Latin America for half a century.

Throughout the eleven books that he published between 1912 and 1952, Molina was basically concerned with philosophical anthropology and with offering "an interpretation of [the human spirit], acceptable even to the skeptics, formulating a consideration of the spiritual in human life where it is constructive and creative, and where it is involved with ethical exigencies" (De...